Tony Abbott: mistaking the crowd for the audience
On the day before Tuesday’s health debate I was giving media training to a client. Tony Abbott should have been there.
“Remember who your audience is,” the client was told. “There’s a huge difference between talking to A Current Affair and talking to the 7.30 Report.”
Abbott thought his audience was the political insiders being wined and dined at the National Press Club. His knee-raised, arms-splayed, loud-laughing, bad-joking, interjecting persona might have raised a cheer from the Liberal faithful in the room but that’s not who his real audience was. If you are talking to Tracey Grimshaw or Kerry O’Brien then you had better understand that while they are conducting the interview you are really giving answers to the hundreds of thousands of viewers out there.
Abbott forgot that and came across to the wider public as aggressive, undisciplined and (whisper it quiet) almost Lathamesque.
Our client was also told never to trash an opposition brand. He could say his product is better, faster, more efficient than other brands but he should never resort to saying another brand was no good and he should never ever ever attack another brand on a personal level.
Abbott had a duty to attack the government’s health plan, and because he has decided not to release the Coalition health plan until closer to the election it was difficult to attack in a constructive way by comparing it unfavourably to his own product. Yet he broke the golden rule when he went after Kevin Rudd on a personal level. Perhaps he was looking for the nightly news grab, but once again he misunderstood his audience.
Making jokes about Rudd being a boring speaker might be all well and good in Parliament – or at the National Press Club during a normal presentation – but personal attacks just don’t fly with anyone except the rapid supporters.
When Mark Latham spoke before the 2004 election of the Howard government being a “conga line of suckholes” Labor stalwarts cheered because he was “giving it” to the Coalition. Undecided voters – the ones he had to impress – wondered whether he had the gravitas to be Prime Minister. A couple of months later they decided, and Latham was no longer.
The Australian public want their leaders to be respectful. They have got to be able to envisage them at important occasions, see them at the White House or a world leader’s forum. They want them to fight, but by the rules of good behaviour.
The same is true of leading brands. We want them to be respectable, we want to be able to display them on important occasions and we want them to spruik their wares in an engaging, innovative and positive manner.
The guy I was training now understands that. Tony Abbott still needs to.
Tiger: Not yet out of the Woods
The entirely predictable problems that stem from Tiger Woods’s decision not to confront the media during last month’s stage-managed mea culpa will be well to the fore at next month’s US Masters at Augusta.
In what was always going to be a PR disaster, Woods and his advisors opted for the golfer to read a statement of remorse in front of a handpicked audience, with no questions asked, when he made his first face-to-face utterances about the sex scandal that engulfed his world, and ours, late last year.
Wiser counsel would have had Woods subject himself to the sort of questions that Tracey Grimshaw put to rugby league’s Matthew Johns in the wake of his sex scandal last May. Grimshaw asked all the questions that people wanted answered, leaving viewers able to make up their own minds on the genuineness of Johns’s contrition and remorse. The general perception is that Johns passed that test and both he and the public now feel free to move on.
Woods, however, has still to answer the questions of why, and how could he, and what was he thinking of, and what about his wife and kids. The public still wants to know, and the journalists still want to not-so-politely enquire.
If Woods thinks that returning to competitive golf in the oh-so-regulated Masters means he will be able to duck such questions then I strongly suspect he has another thing coming. The Masters will no doubt try to weed out what they see as the trouble-making tabloid journalists, keeping the media to the golfing faithful. But while golf writers have traditionally shied away from asking questions about anything other than golf there is little doubt that respective editors will have stiffened their spines considerably with subtle lines like: ‘’If you don’t ask the right questions don’t bother reporting back for work the following week.’’
And if the Masters organisers, or Woods’s minders, try to ban any non-golfing questions then be prepared for a media walkout.
The questions will have to be answered, either at Augusta or the next tournament or the next, dragging out a matter that should have been settled months ago.
But that’s what happens when a crisis strategy is all about control, with barely a nod to candour.
Is social media becoming more or less sociable?
The murder of a Queensland schoolgirl, a video of a group of teenage boys in Italy taunting an autistic boy, a $30,000 defamation verdict and Lara Bingle have all combined in the last week or so to show that the world may at last be starting to catch up with social media.
The growth of social media over the past decade has been exponential, so much so that the legal and ethical restrictions that society has for virtually all other activities have struggled to seem relevant.
“The internet is different”, people cried, “Its very basis is the free exchange of information.”
Well, maybe.
A Victorian man posted an anonymous comment on HotCopper, a stock market discussion forum. The comment, about a WA technology security company and its managing director, was defamatory. The managing director tried to get HotCopper to identify the poster. HotCopper refused, but was forced to by a court order. The registered name ended up being false but the poster was eventually tracked down and taken to court for defamation – the result being the $30,000 verdict against him. Two other supposedly anonymous posters on the same site have court action pending against them.
The moral: a court has shown that anonymous is no longer anonymous, and the normal rules of law will apply to anything you say.
In Queensland an outpouring of grief over the murder of a young girl led to a tribute page being set up on Facebook. That page was defaced, with people posting insulting and derogatory remarks and links to porn sites. The call was for Facebook to “do something”, with the general tenor being that Facebook and other sites should be responsible for the material they contain. But, as University of NSW Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre executive director David Vaile was quoted as saying on smh.com.au, making website owners or internet providers more accountable for online content would lead to their demise and see the end of free social networking sites.
The moral: administrators of Facebook pages need to be aware of their responsibilities. If you set up an open site then you should be able to moderate it – around the clock if necessary. If you can’t then either don’t set up the site or bring in reinforcements.
In Italy, the six month suspended jail sentences given to three Google executives has led to a further outcry. The executives were on trial for defamation and for violating Italy’s privacy laws. The trio were found guilty of the privacy charges in that they were held responsible for Google having hosted the offensive video. The video was online for around two months but was taken down as soon as Google was informed of its contents.
Google announced it would appeal, saying the ruling “attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built.”
Google said the European Union law gave hosting providers “a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence… If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.“
Well, again maybe.
It would certainly create havoc with the Google business model, but perhaps that’s what the judge was getting at. The reasons for the decision have yet to be published but Marc Rotenberg, writing in the Huffington Post, says that there seem to be similarities between this case and cases in the early 1900s which established a person’s right to privacy in the US. Those cases established that a person’s image could not be used for commercial purposes without their permission. Rotenberg says that the Italian case hinged on the prosecutor’s claim that Google was making profit out of the video, which was driving people to the site and its advertisers.
The moral: not certain yet, but it may well be that if you are making money by hosting advertisements on site then you may end up being viewed as a commercial operation rather than just a host.
And to finish with Lara Bingle, the social page habitué who announced that she was taking legal action against AFL player Brendan Fevola after a nude image of her was made public on a website and in a magazine. The picture shows Bingle naked in a shower trying to cover herself.
Bingle is taking action “for breach of privacy, defamation and misuse of her image.” Just what that will result in is anyone’s guess, but it could end up a cautionary tale about mobile phone cameras, ease of downloading and the relentless spread of the web.
The moral: be careful of the company you keep.
Sam North and Brian Giesen take second place in the Ogilvy Digital Influence Essay Writing Competition
In November 2009, the Ogilvy Digital Influence Essay Writing Competition was announced. All Ogilvy employees from Asia Pacific were invited to submit an essay on the topic of Digital Influence. Our very own Sam North and Brian Giesen joined forces, with their essay Digital Influence taking second place out of 28 entries submitted. Congratulations Sam and Brian from everyone at Ogilvy PR!
Digital influence
By Sam North (with sorely needed input from Brian Giesen)
At the start of 2009 Ogilvy PR in Australia makes a brave decision. No doubt some think it foolish, but at the height of the Global Financial Crisis two senior people are employed – and to newly-created positions.
One is a 57-year-old, overweight, grey-haired, career journalist, direct from a 21-year stint at the Sydney Morning Herald where he had ended up as the paper’s Managing Editor. He’s the Sam North in the above byline and it’s fair to say that when he begins as Ogilvy’s Media Director he is pretty much a digital influence sceptic.
The other is Brian Giesen, a buff, enthusiastic 35-year-old from Ogilvy in Washington DC, and a digital influence expert brought to Sydney to give the locals the low-down on this shiny new toy [Note: Giesen says that ‘’shiny new toy’’ is North’s description. Giesen describes the digital world as the most exciting, liberating thing to happen to communications since the invention of the telephone].
The two find they get on well together, but North delights in asking the hard-bitten, cynical questions of Giesen and other experts at the various educational forums run for the Ogilvy crew in Sydney. He throws around phrases like ‘’how do we see a return on investment’’ and intimates that the likes of Twitter and Facebook and Yabber are of interest only to the young and the restless who will soon move on to something else.
Giesen and North give speeches at the same new media conference in Brisbane. Giesen talks about the election of Obama and how social media is harnessed to motivate tens of thousands of usually apathetic Americans to become involved in the political process. His speech is a triumph.
North talks about how the old media is still alive and kicking. He sounds, even to himself, like Canute trying to hold back the tide. His speech is politely ignored.
Giesen and North work on a KFC campaign to promote a new grilled chicken burger. North provides some media training for the spokespeople while Giesen sets up a Facebook page for KFC.
Facebook for a chicken burger, thinks North. Yeah, right!
Traditional media virtually ignores the launch but the Facebook page, which offers a coupon for which a free burger can be redeemed, has hundreds of people lining up around the block causing pedestrian chaos in downtown Sydney.
Within a week the Facebook page has attracted 84,000 friends. A handful of people post messages attacking KFC for the nutritional value of its products, but those voices are quickly stamped on by other KFC fans. It’s the perfect scenario, consumers standing up for the brand without any input from the company.
Giesen has the good manners not to mention North’s nay-saying.
His prejudices wounded but still functioning, North hangs on to his suspicion that it’s only the young and tech-savvy who get the digital world.
Then Giesen shows him a statistic from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. For the uninitiated, the ABC is Australia’s public broadcaster with TV and radio networks. The demographic of viewers and listeners skews towards older people. What Giesen says is that the ABC audience (in a country with a population of 22 million, mind you) downloads 5 million vodcasts and podcasts each month.
While North ponders the fact that there might just be a few older people out there with at least some semblance of technical skill, Giesen tells him that of the 8.1 million Australians who use Facebook, 700,000 are over the age of 50. I must get myself on to Facebook, North thinks to himself.
Giesen, never one to let an opportunity pass, adds that in October Facebook’s Australian users uploaded 80 million pictures and wrote 32 million wall posts and 45 million status updates.
North pretends not to be impressed by that, or by the help Giesen’s team gives him during a big announcement for Ford in Melbourne.
They set up on-line monitoring for the period surrounding the announcement and North finds himself finding out in real time what the websites and blogs and Tweeters are saying. It’s an invaluable service that gives North the opportunity to react and target the message to counter any growing trend of criticism, complaint or query. North looks good, Giesen and Ogilvy look better.
Giesen’s glow becomes even rosier when the TED organisation want help with publicising the quest by religious scholar Karen Armstrong, the winner of the 2008 TED Prize, for the world’s major religions to come together in recognition of the principle which is at the core of all faiths – compassion.
At the heart of the campaign is the Charter for Compassion, a document crafted by people of all religions which was launched in November with the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond TuTu as its first two signatories. It is intended that people will access the website to join the charter and show that the overwhelming voice in all religions is one of compassion – not negativity or violence.
Giesen’s team creates a 3 minute video featuring prominent Australians saying just what ‘’compassion’’ means to them. Those giving their thoughts range from celebrity chefs through to influential food and marketing bloggers.
The video is completed in a day and a half and is sent to around 200 bloggers and Twitterers. By any measure it delivers an outstanding, authentic, heartfelt message.
The video is picked up by Australia’s major news organisation and run on its websites, with more than 20,000 viewers choosing to spend three minutes of their time thinking about compassion and being driven to the Charter’s website.
Giesen then steps right into North’s territory and builds a social media centre for Microsoft Australia’s website, to coincide with the new Windows 7 operating system. North thinks he knows something about media centres so logs on to pick holes in Giesen’s work.
There’s access to Twitter and Facebook and Ustream TV. You can click onto various Microsoft bloggers. There’s are current and historic media releases, and recent news items featuring Microsoft, not to mention the impressive image bank available via Flickr and the plethora of videos. Suddenly North is feeling that the current crop of journalists have it too good.
The year ends with North at a pitch. ‘’You should think about social media,’’ he advises the client, without even a hint of embarrassment.
North explains that in the future every campaign is likely to embrace social media and will get ordinary people involved in a brand, a campaign, or an issue, through sharing values and opinions.
He goes on about all forms of communications being about conversations and about how it’s not necessarily all about a brand interacting with its customers but as much about facilitating customers’ interaction with each other.
‘’Social media will grow your brand, strengthen the connection between you and your customers and keep you grounded and aware of what people really think about your company,’’ he says with all the conviction of the newly-minted zealot.
A wry, tolerant smile touches Giesen’s lips as his innate good manners prevent him from commenting.
